VTM Bloodright

BLOODRIGHT: Los Angeles by Night

Storypath Ultra · Vampire · Play-by-Post · 5 players

"You want to know who runs this city? Nobody runs this city. That's the whole point, and it's the only thing eleven people with fangs have agreed on in eighty years. Ask me again when you've been dead longer than a season." — Adelina Cruz, Baron of Downtown


The pitch
Los Angeles has not had a Prince since 1944, when the Kindred here killed the last one in his own Elysium and declined to appoint another. It has been an Anarch Free State ever since — eleven baronies, no Traditions handed down from Europe, and a standing agreement that nobody gets to be in charge.
In 2004 the Camarilla tried to take it back. They sent a Ventrue named Sebastian LaCroix, who declared himself Prince from a tower downtown and produced an ancient sarcophagus he swore held an Antediluvian, and for a few months this city ran on that fear while he spent everyone who might have stopped him. The sarcophagus was empty. It had always been empty. LaCroix died in his own building and the Camarilla has not tried again.
That was twenty-two years ago. Everyone who mattered then is dead, gone, or has not moved from the same chair since.
Two winters ago the canyons burned, and havens that had stood since the studio era went with them. Now the city is rebuilding for an Olympics, which means federal money, new transit, and a surveillance layer that did not exist three years ago — and a federal task force riding it that has taken four Kindred off the board in eighteen months.
You are neonates. No barony, no boons anyone will honour, and a hunger that gets worse every time you use what you are. What you have is each other, a piece of a city nobody has finished re-claiming, and time — as long as you are careful.
Tone
Personal horror before politics. The Beast is not a status bar. It is a second character sharing your sheet, and the rules hand you the choice of when to feed it, every session, forever.
The Masquerade is a surveillance problem. In 2026 nobody needs to see you. They need your face to be in the dataset. Half the tension in this chronicle is logistics, and the other half is what you are willing to do to somebody to solve them.
Nobody is coming. No Prince, no Camarilla protection, no sire who will step in. The barons will use you and disown you and that is the working relationship on offer.
If you played Bloodlines, you will recognise a lot of this. 2004 is the backstory, not the plot. Nines, LaCroix, Smiling Jack, the Asylum, the Last Round, Strauss, Abrams, Golden, the courts in Chinatown — all of it happened, to other people, before you were dead. I am not re-running it and you do not need to have played it. But the city remembers, and so will some of the people you meet.
The system
Storypath Ultra, not Storyteller. Roll a pool of Attribute + Skill, count 8s and up as hits, 10s as two, against a difficulty that says how many hits you need. What is left over you spend on Tricks — named extras that let a good roll do more than you hit him.
Three things worth knowing up front:

• Failure pays the table. Every failed roll adds Momentum to a shared pool that anyone can spend to turn a later failure into a success, buy a fact into the scene, or bolster a roll. Bad nights fund good ones.
• Risk is quoted before you roll. The Storyguide names the Complication and its price in advance, and you decide whether to accept it. You should never be blindsided by a cost you weren't offered the chance to decline.
• You are never forced to be someone you're not. Influence that lands can always be refused by taking a hard bargain instead — a real cost of your choosing, not a surrendered character.

Everything is in the player's guide, and you will not need the Storypath Ultra core book to play.
What you need to know before applying

• Everyone is a neonate. Blood Potency 1, Embraced in the last fifty years. Elders exist and you cannot fight them — an elder holds two points of Blood Advantage on you, which means they roll at +4 Enhancement while you resist at +2 difficulty. That is not a modifier. It is the reason neonates work in coteries.
• Fourteen clans plus Caitiff, all playable, all written up.
• The Beast and your Nature both fill, and both are dangerous. Clinging to who you were will get you killed as fast as feeding the thing that replaced you. There is no safe end of that scale.
• Vitae is fuel, not health. Every Discipline you fire and every push you make walks you toward Hungry, and Hungry means the Storyguide gets to charge you for existing.
• We play in one city. No globetrotting. Los Angeles is big enough.
• Lines and veils get agreed in the recruitment thread, before session one, and can be added to at any point without discussion.

Character creation

• Neonate, three Paths: your clan, your sire, and whatever you were before.
• 6 + 3 + 3 Skill dots from Paths, plus 3 free. 10 + 4 + 4 Attribute dots.
• 4 Discipline dots, capped at 3 in a clan Discipline. 5 Edge dots. 5 Contact dots.
• Bonds with the other characters are mandatory — one at rating 2, two at rating 1. Negative Bonds count and are usually better.
• Pick your Nature and your Ambition. The Ambition is why you are still doing any of this.
• Send me a concept, not a sheet. I would rather nobody spent an evening statting a character that doesn't get picked. We build after selection.

Posting expectations

• Five players, one post per weekday minimum.
• 48-hour clock in conflict scenes. At the deadline I resolve absent characters sensibly and keep moving — flagged now so nobody is surprised later.
• Conditional declarations in conflicts: post your action and its branches. This is the single habit that keeps a forum fight from taking two months.
• Dice in the open, Momentum tracked in the first post of each chapter.
• Downtime between chapters is a real phase with its own thread — feeding, contacts, Aspirations, repairing Bonds, and room for quieter characters to be central.
• Roughly a year for the full arc.

To apply
Answer these three in your own words. Short is fine; specific is better.

1. Who Embraced you, and did they stay?
2. What did you lose that you have not replaced?
3. What does your Beast want that you are most afraid of giving it?

Then a writing sample: 200–400 words, the hour before dawn, somewhere in this city, alone. No combat, no build notes. I want your voice.
Applications open for two weeks. I will pick five, and I will tell everyone either way.